I was having a convo IRL with someone about this lately. I cannot understand the "NOT MY CHILDREN" attitude.... coming from a guy who had no problem with porn in principle, and whose attitude about even young teens looking at porn was that it was just inevitable and not that bad. I don't get it.

If you don't think porn in principle is unethical, then...
we may assume you don't think producing it is unethical, and...
You don't think teens looking at porn is in principle bad or unethical, so...
we may assume you don't feel anyone has been harmed by exposure to the porn in question, and so then....

I'm forced to ask, how is it possible for a person who believes these things to simultaneously believe that the woman who starred in the porn is forever tainted and cannot be allowed around children? What has she even done wrong according to that very world view?

and I think this encapsulates the biggest main problem I have with most porn, is how it implicitly and sometimes explicitly promotes the attitude that having sex taints and lessens women (but not men) irreparably.

The fact the "will [he] still respect me in the morning?" is even a thing is another example of this. Because logically, why shouldn't he? You two just engaged in the exact same act, together.

It is influencing attitudes like this which is the most damaging effect of porn, and really the question is not "does porn influence people's attitudes," because all media influences people's attitudes, the question is how widespread is the influence and is the overall effect good, bad, or neutral.

The same that applies to the problematic nature of certain slurs and racist practices also pretty much applies to arguments about the problematic nature of pornography. You can't really understand it outside of the context.

But that doesn't mean that you can just philosophically interpret the negative aspects away. This stuff is happening in the real world and we need to look at it in terms of how it is influenced by and in turn affects the real world.

I don't think Thenadathor took it outside the context and how it affects the real world, I think his/her opinion focused on the 'if you can find a single exception, you can't make an absolutely accurate general claim'. As a thought, this isn't incorrect. And it is 'inside' the world because the exception was taken from a real-world example.

If you want to make the case that we should deem something (like porn) either beneficiary or harmful, depending on its majority of applications/manifestations, it's your choice. If someone else wants to deem said something as 'beneficial or harmful depending on the situation', it's their choice too. None of these choices is 'incorrect', it's a matter of how you want to approach reality.

I agree with the maxim that a single exception invalidates absolute general claims, though I'm just not sure how useful it is as a descriptor for things where the scales are massively tipped.

I am not and have not mad a statement about the total, absolute merits or lacktherof of all porn. I'm not saying making an absolute sweeping statment is valid.

Buuuuut.... if your position is basically that "everything is relative" in the sense that value judgements cannot be made, we will have to disagree. Even if absolute statements cannot be made about a given proposition, that is no basis to claim that one statement is not or cannot be more or less correct than another.

... as in the fallacy where someone claims that since there are only two possible outcomes, they are each 50% likely. This is not necessarily true, it could be 80/20. (I am not claiming you make this fallacy, I merely find it a good analogy to evaluating subjective claims of wrongness)

EDIT: Also for context I am not a moral relativist. I am some kind of consequentialist.

I am not a more relativist either and I totally understand your 50% vs 20/80 example. Especially in the 'seeing a swastika in public' it makes perfect sense.

I disagee on definition with 'more or less correct', in the sense that I view 'correctness' as an absolute term. But, we can quantify it and solve the situation by viewing how 'far' from the absolute correct statement, two different incorrect statements lie. In that case, both statements would still be incorrect, but one would be farther from the truth. I, personally, wouldn't feel comforable calling one 'more correct' or 'less incorrect' than the other because I see correct/incorrect as binary, mutally exclusive ,absolutes ,but an understanding would be achieved.

Okies. In that case I don't think we actually disagree about much. I wasn't really conceiving of "correct" as necessarily absolute, more like a spectrum, and I'm not really wedded to that word in any case, so how you describe it is actually very close to what I was thinking.

It is influencing attitudes like this which is the most damaging effect of porn, and really the question is not "does porn influence people's attitudes," because all media influences people's attitudes, the question is how widespread is the influence and is the overall effect good, bad, or neutral.

I agree with pretty much everything you say up until this. But this statement simply doesn't follow from what you said before.

You point out this attitude, and then you go into how it's a damaging effect of porn. Which is actually a perpetuation of the very attitude you just spoke against. What you are saying (not what you meant I'm sure, but what comes off from the quoted paragraph) is that since society views women as being "damaged" by having sex, the proper response is for women to not be shown having and enjoying sex. In other words, that we should simply give up and bow down to this sexist attitude rather than fight against it.

Yes, porn influences people's attitudes, often not for the better. Yes, the conditions people work under are in serious need of improvement. Neither of these goals will be met by demonizing porn and driving it further underground. The solution to people's medieval attitudes towards sex is not to hide sex away.

You point out this attitude, and then you go into how it's a damaging effect of porn. Which is actually a perpetuation of the very attitude you just spoke against. What you are saying (not what you meant I'm sure, but what comes off from the quoted paragraph) is that since society views women as being "damaged" by having sex, the proper response is for women to not be shown having and enjoying sex. In other words, that we should simply give up and bow down to this sexist attitude rather than fight against it.

No, what I actually said is that since society views women as being "damaged" by sex, the proper response is not to show narratives where sex is explicitly portrayed as being intrinsically degrading to women! Which is like, most mainstream porn ffs.

Quote:

Yes, porn influences people's attitudes, often not for the better. Yes, the conditions people work under are in serious need of improvement. Neither of these goals will be met by demonizing porn and driving it further underground. The solution to people's medieval attitudes towards sex is not to hide sex away.

Speaking of reading into things that which is not there, where have I suggested that we demonize porn or drive it underground?

What I suggested, and you may need to go back to the first page to refresh yourself, is that the first step is people being self-conscious about the nature of porn, and most importantly that porn itself is self-conscious about it's nature.

Agreed that blaming it all on the industry doesn't work. And better education and, shall we call it, sexual literacy in general will help. That goes hand in hand with my point that we are more literate about, and more willing to discuss, videogames products than we are sex products. That lack of open discourse is part of why, currently, the harm porn does is so much more of a concern, because it's left to fill a void that doesn't have enough other messaging to counterbalance. And that's worth talking about.

I'm just saying, the industry still isn't blameless. Especially these guys:

But generally it seems that pornography has made more guys think that "facials" and anal sex are normal, when they're only normal within pornography. I think for some good female empowered pornography is:

The thing that some radfems fail to recognise in my opinion is that porn, that is, the idea of watching people do sexy things and then doing sexy things while watching them do sexy things, is not inherently sexist. Its something that engages with sexuality, and often has a message. Not everything that engages with sexuality and has a message is inherently sexist! Its the same reason political correctness fails to solve racism: the decision to talk about culture and race and the definitions of those words and trends and how these words interact is not inherently racist, in fact if I may editorialize a bit, I think being afraid to engage in a discussion about race for fear of being dehumanized actually reinforces racism by making the topic taboo and difficult to engage with, engagement which leads to healing. Similarly, believing that the act of watching sexual stuff happen on a screen for the purposes of being aroused is inherently sexist actually reinforces sexism. .

Ah, "political correctness." Forgive me for being leery of people who complain about this term non-ironically. In my experience the behavior they are referring to as "political correctness" can most easily be described as "not being a deliberate asshole to your fellow human beings."

I think you are making a false dichotomy here. Just because the meaning of a certain word isn't literally encoded onto it's very phonemes doesn't mean it can be completely unmoored from the context that gave it it's meaning in the first place.

Sure, the swastika started out as a symbol of good fortune. Sure, there is nothing inherent about that symbol which says it must indicate racism/anti-semitism. Does that mean Jewish people or minorities are unreasonable in interpreting the display of a swastika as such? No. Does that mean it's unreasonable to expect people raised in our culture to understand that it is generally considered a dick move to display swastikas? Fuck no.

And the exact same thing can be said for racial slurs, race-face makeup, fucking nooses, That dumbass "ching-chong" thing people do to Asians, using the word "female" as a noun when referencing humans etc. In like 95% percent of cases claiming to be totally ignorant of the meaning is incredible. It is literally without credibility. The meanings these things have derive from a heavy history and context, and you can't just wish that away with your good intentions.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, what exactly do you mean by

Quote:

being afraid to engage in a discussion about race for fear of being dehumanized

??

One thing I really cannot abide is this persistent attitude that being told you did a racist thing is worse than doing a racist thing.

FFS "dehumanized"?! Do you know what is dehumanizing? Suffering from the effects of racism. Do you know what isn't? Having someone tell you that maybe you are doing a racist thing. Hold on... I think I have a picture that perfectly expresses my feelings on this topic.

TLDR;
The same that applies to the problematic nature of certain slurs and racist practices also pretty much applies to arguments about the problematic nature of pornography. You can't really understand it outside of the context.

But that doesn't mean that you can just philosophically interpret the negative aspects away. This stuff is happening in the real world and we need to look at it in terms of how it is influenced by and in turn affects the real world.

I read your post a couple times and then read my post a couple times, and it seems like you arent actually engaging with what I'm saying directly. It seems like you are looking for things to take issue with and then doing so without confirming that your objection actually lines up with what I said. I agree with most of what you're saying in your response, except you phrase it as if you are disagreeing with me, when you aren't. Also, yo dawg you put a false dichotomy in your post accusing me of false dichotomy so you can be ignorant while you're hypocritical .

just read your post again, think about the points you're making and ask yourself "is what I'm saying a response to what he said, or just a self-indulgent emotional release?"

Like look at the political correctness thing. my point was essentially "people shouldn't be afraid to talk about things that are controversial, because having those conversations is important" which you interpreted as "it's okay to not care about hurting people". Do you see the distinction here? Its the same thing with my mention of dehumanizing. You are responding to a point I never made. I never said someone telling you you are doing a racist thing dehumanizes you, did I? Please just focus on what I'm saying, not your ideal straw man._________________Don`t give up.

Okay, porn. We have subjects and consumers. I dislike the gender binary, but that makes things even more confusing and I wanna just talk about things topically so lets first assume the idea of two genders makes sense (it doesn't).

The statement "ALL PORN IS BAD/SEXIST" is impossible to justify. Rational thinkers understand this. 99.9999999999% of porn could be bad and the statement still wouldn't make sense.

The core of this issue is the dual concepts of the individual level and the macro-cultural level. if you think the individual level doesnt matter even a little bit, dont read my posts. we disagree on such a fundamental ontological level that we won't be useful to each other.

The obvious truth is that on the individual level, there DOES exist porn which depicts women enjoying sex without inherently having much, if any, patriarchy-enforcing tendencies. Mysogynists could watch it, enjoy it, and pretend the women involved are submissive and helpless and all those other nasty associations, but there DOES exist content which does not seem to come pre-packed with this mysogyny. http://www.ifeelmyself.com/public/main.php is one example, in my opinion.

The thing that some radfems fail to recognise in my opinion is that porn, that is, the idea of watching people do sexy things and then doing sexy things while watching them do sexy things, is not inherently sexist. Its something that engages with sexuality, and often has a message. Not everything that engages with sexuality and has a message is inherently sexist! Its the same reason political correctness fails to solve racism: the decision to talk about culture and race and the definitions of those words and trends and how these words interact is not inherently racist, in fact if I may editorialize a bit, I think being afraid to engage in a discussion about race for fear of being dehumanized actually reinforces racism by making the topic taboo and difficult to engage with, engagement which leads to healing. Similarly, believing that the act of watching sexual stuff happen on a screen for the purposes of being aroused is inherently sexist actually reinforces sexism.

The porn industry (like all media) has become decentralized due to the Internet, among other things. There are pockets of porn where things are good, everyone is happy, and nobody feels exploited. They are smaller than the ones where women are made to depict things which give me a psychic revulsion, be it due to the more obvious or subtle reinforcing of really shitty gender roles. THE TWO PREVIOUS SENTENCES BOTH CO EXIST. Personally, I try and avoid and rally against the stuff that doesn't work, and while I don't really watch porn anymore these days, I celebrate the stuff that does work culturally. Flipping the table or holding your breath or all those other ways of colloquially being obstinate or dogmatic are not helping.

I will wager I can link between 5 and 10 sites that range from problematic to vile for every sex positive minimally problematic site you could post up.

I said it earlier, the fact that non-degrading porn exists, does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that it is a significant portion of porn consumed.

you're right. I agree with you. what you just said agrees with what I said. who the fuck thinks most porn isn't vile. why on earth do you think your response doesn't comport with my post? what am I missing? did you read it all the way through?_________________Don`t give up.

Lulz, says the guy who didn't even try to engage with my arguments and was outright dismissive of everything I said.

Look, if I misinterpreted you I'm honestly sorry (and I do remember asking you what you meant by dehumanizing in the post. Which, again, you didn't reply to, because you didn't actually respond to anything I wrote...).

But let's be clear, you're the one who just flippantly dismissed an(several) entire argument(s) without addressing them at all, not me.

And you didn't even bother to attempt to understand my argument before deliberately misconstruing it. Talk about self-indulgent straw-men. Whatever makes you feel better man. Congratulations on not responding to a single point, though! I'm sure that's much easier than actually engaging someone.

Lulz, says the guy who didn't even try to engage with my arguments and was outright dismissive of everything I said.

Look, if I misinterpreted you I'm honestly sorry (and I do remember asking you what you meant by dehumanizing in the post. Which, again, you didn't reply to, because you didn't actually respond to anything I wrote...).

But let's be clear, you're the one who just flippantly dismissed an(several) entire argument(s) without addressing them at all, not me.

And you didn't even bother to attempt to understand my argument before deliberately misconstruing it. Talk about self-indulgent straw-men. Whatever makes you feel better man. Congratulations on not responding to a single point, though! I'm sure that's much easier than actually engaging someone.

I did engage with your points. I described them, then showed how they seemed to not directly address what I said. Perhaps I could do a better job, though! One sec. I am going to do this properly, brb._________________Don`t give up.